They may have been talking about household income, but msmith537 was talking about individual salaries: (emphasis mine)
I think people are very much aware of how much these things cost, actually. Hence, why the American Dream is just a dream, not a reality, for many Americans right now.
I think a recurring annual income of $100,000 counts as rich - although I wouldn’t argue with someone who called it “upper middle class” instead. I wouldn’t count a single year’s inflow of $100,000 as rich in and of itself.
I have no problem believing that 77% of working Americans have one year with household income greater than $100,000. I also don’t think this means all that much. Imagine a middle-class married couple. The husband earns $35,000 a year. The wife earns $40,000 a year. Their children have all moved out of the home, so they decide to sell the house and buy something a little smaller. Their total annual income of $75,000 combined with the earnings on the sale of the house could easily pass the $100,000 mark. (Depends on how much equity they have, etc.)
I would be very surprised if anywhere near 77% of the population had consistent household income over $100,000 over multiple years.
Also note that the figure is for “working Americans”, which is obviously not all Americans.
This fallacy is frustrating, but I hear it often in these types of discussions. The money doesn’t just come in and disappear - it’s spent. And from this spending, something is acquired. (That is, after all, what money is for.)
Do other people, who don’t make $250,000, spend money on their children’s education? If so, then it’s highly unlikely that they are spending it on the same schools. If not, it’s probably because they cannot afford to. In either case, she’s able to afford a product that others cannot.
Do other people, who don’t make $250,000, pay rent (or a mortgage)? Of course - but they are highly unlikely to live in as nice of a house or in as nice of an area. Sponder is buying something with her money which other people cannot afford.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course - if you have money, you can spend it more or less however you want. But nobody should get to pretend that their ability to spend large amounts of money on expensive things doesn’t count as being rich just because they do spend it. (As opposed to hoarding it and diving into it Scrooge McDuck style, one presumes.)
I think it’s a regional thing. I was a state government employee and as I said above there were a few years when I made above six figures. But I live in New York where salaries are generally high - but are balanced by a cost of living that’s also high. I’ve noticed that southern states often have lower salaries and lower costs of living.
I remember back in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for President and an article mentioned his salary. I was amazed to discover that I had a higher salary than the Governor of Arkansas.
There’s a really great, incisive, and entertaining (often hilarious) book by Paul Fussell called Class. In it, Fussell divides Americans into seven classes (plus an eighth “X class” he identifies at the end, for people–including himself–who are sort of bohemian and educated and not as hidebound by status as the others): destitute, lower prole, medium prole, upper prole, middle class, upper-middle class, and out-of-sight rich. And he is quick to note that these do not always track perfectly by income/wealth, though certainly the destitutes and out-of-sight rich do. Upper proles, for instance, can in his designation often have more money than many middle class people do. But they never wear a suit and tie, usually are not college educated, and are likely to spend their money on things like four wheel ATVs or home furnishings/decor that would be seen as gauche by the classes above them.
I do think at the very least there are distinctions to be made based on one’s education level, and the education and wealth of one’s parents. But still, at the end of the day, money matters too.
Indeed. My wife has two masters degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key, but in her job as a public school teacher her max-out is well below six figures (it may end up being technically above that in nominal terms, but only because of inflation and COL increases). Hard to argue though that her job is not a professional one that qualifies as middle class.
FFS. I know so many people around here that work multiple jobs supporting a family, and would drool over a job that paid even $15 an hour. What you are saying sounds so very bad, like you are channelling Marie Antoinette (or the popular understanding of her in any case).
This.
Also this. Do you remember that guy in Chicago (might have been a U of Chicago law school professor or something) who became infamous for complaining that his income of more than $250K didn’t go very far, and he claimed he couldn’t afford cable TV or somesuch nonsense?
Actually, ‘middle class’ has only briefly had anything to do with the 50th percentile. Historically, it’s been the space in between the class of landed gentry and the class of laborers and servants.
In Victorian England, for instance, middle class people had servants, which meant that there were more servants than middle class people. Plus you had factory laborers and the people who worked the land to produce the income that the gentry depended on. So if you were in the ‘middle class,’ you were comfortably above the median in terms of income.
Only in the brief moment of widely shared wealth that America experienced in the wake of unionization and WWII has there been a rough congruence between the comforts of middle-class living and the median income. As that congruence slips away, whether the meaning of ‘middle class’ will follow median income or follow what the chattering classes think of as a middle-class lifestyle is up for grabs.
I think that has more to do with your specific job than working in NY , though. I also work for NYS and in my experience even most of those employees with college degrees are not going to crack six figures without overtime.Not the lawyers, not the accountants, not the social workers ,not the teachers ,not the HR people. Sure, some of them will be promoted into supervisory or managerial jobs that do pay that much , but just to use my office as an example there are 19 people in positions requiring a college degree and at least 2 have master’s degrees. Only one person has a six figure salary- and not by much.
I think that when **msmith537 ** says
he’s not considering a lot of jobs that require a college degree nor that there are often large salary differences for the same profession ( a CPA working for an auditing firm no doubt earns much more than an accountant working for a company with three retail stores) and that most of the jobs are not at the high end of the scale.
The only way I will ever crack 100k is to get an inheritance or get married. But 100k as others have said is not hard for two working professionals, and I’m sure a lot of the people who crack 250k do so because of inheritance, or selling a house, or cashing in a retirement package and not because of salary. 100k in household income still places you at about the 80th percentile (250k in household is something like the top 2-3%). I believe 100k in personal income puts you in the top 10% or so.
If you open up an issue of Architectural Digest or Home magazine, you see houses - those homes aren’t owned by people who work for a living making a mere $250k a year household income. Go to a marina on the ocean and take a look at the boats, those boats aren’t owned by people in that class - you need more money (unless you are boat obsessive and you own THAT boat). Yes, the money spends, but you don’t have enough of it at that amount of money to spend like someone rich - simply like someone affluent.
If rich simply means “better off than I am” - anyone who makes more than $60k a year will be rich to half the people out there. Then what is the word for a couple who buys his and hers Mercedes S classes each year - plus keeps a classic Porche Boxter to drive in the summer, and has a summer home in the Hamptons, she buys Jimmy Choo shoes and carries Kate Spade handbags and he plays golf at courses that have $300 greens fees then goes to the bar for $200 pours of Scotch and who donates to their alma mater in amounts to have buildings named after them? AND still see their net worth grow each year.
As Shagnasty said - the break even point for a suburban Boston middle class lifestyle was $10k a month with kids. People at that income don’t qualify for many tax breaks or aid for college, so they need to save for college, and save for retirement - which puts a crimp in the amount of available money to either spend on luxuries or roll around in naked. Today’s middle class lifestyle includes a bedroom for each kid in a school district where the test scores are above the median and half the kids are college bound. That can mean a $4k a month or more mortgage in a lot of the country (we’ve done it cheaper, but our school district is less than ideal and our house is modest - and we are in the Twin Cities - not Boston, New York, Seattle or San Francisco.)
And yes, that means that for a lot of Americans the American Dream is just a dream - but that doesn’t make two people working full time jobs in Boston so that they can pay $3k in daycare and $4k in mortgage while keeping up 401k contributions, trying to start the kids college funds, and spending a week at the beach once a year rich.
Self employed people in a good year. Big bonuses at work. Stock options that do well. If you have two people making just over six figures, and there are good bonus programs at work and your companies both have fantastic years, or you switch companies and get a vacation payout for the five weeks of vacation you’ve horded, plus get a signing bonus at your new company (I did that in my last job switch - a tidy little windfall).
$36 thousand a year for daycare? Per child?
Guess it is true…
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/crushed-by-the-cost-of-child-care/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
If I had children and was in some city, I would really be considering something like this…
http://midwifediaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/BabyCage.jpg
Exactly.
That “poor” coworker of mine has recently been complaining about the $20K she just spent on fertility treatments. Don’t ask her if she wants to go grab lunch, because she’ll use even a mundane question like this to whine about her poverty. I wish I had the balls to remind her that poor people don’t have $20K to spend. Not on fertility treatments. Not on open-heart surgery. The fact that she has $20K makes her very much not poor.
When I told her I was going to Sedona this summer, her response was along the lines of, “Must be nice…” Yes, it IS nice being able to afford luxuries…which the BOTH of us are able to do. I shutter to think how she’s going to behave her fertility treatments work.
I sympathize with everyone who is trying to juggle reality with “living the dream”. But being able to live the dream is a luxury. So when the $250K’ers say stuff like, “You don’t know how expensive it is to have all these things…”, I DO roll my eyes. I don’t think even the poorest of the poor begrudge the well-to-do of living their dreams. They’re just sick of people equating their struggle for survival with having enough money to send the kids to private school.
[quote=I think it’s a regional thing. I was a state government employee and as I said above there were a few years when I made above six figures. But I live in New York where salaries are generally high - but are balanced by a cost of living that’s also high. I’ve noticed that southern states often have lower salaries and lower costs of living.[/quote]
IIRC, you said you didn’t get paid a salary. I know that in my agency, we don’t get to choose whether we are salary or wage.
I would get a salary bump if I transferred to NoVa because of the higher cost of living there. But it still wouldn’t be anything close to six figures.
I think most children would thoroughly enjoy being suspended over a city street in a cage.
Hey, you are outside, and your senses are being stimulated by the sights, sounds and smells of passing traffic. The little tykes can study the different architectural styles of nearby buildings, or they can conduct experiments with gravity by dropping items from the cage.
Sure, they might get a little lonely at some point, but there would always be the possibility of being visited by pigeons.
I don’t even think a chilly wind would bother that little guy because he is wearing a rather cozy and stylish looking Barbaloot suit.
I would consider it to be a rather innovative daycare alternative.
That’s interesting, but going forward it really doesn’t mean much: what matters is what it means now, and what it means in the future. And we who speak and write the English language are in charge of that. If there is ambiguity (and there is), we can push a term like this in the direction we want it to go.
Oh, absolutely. I feel like in my family, we are fortunate: decent sized TV (to me, anyway: 42 inches) that doubles as a computer monitor, Blu-ray player and two-disc Netflix queue to feed it along with Netflix Instant Watch and Amazon Prime. Fast broadband with Wi-fi, and each member of the family has some kind of tablet (my wife and I each have a newish iPad *and *iTouch). We have Spotify accounts that give us virtually unlimited music “collections”. Living the dream in some ways.
But we don’t have cable TV or satellite, we only have AC in some rooms, and many of our interior doorways have plastic sheeting or Wal-Mart $5 twin sheets nailed up because we can’t afford actual doors. For three years we couldn’t afford to have a car but now feel pretty swanky that (since last October) we have a '99 Subaru that we manage to keep running as it keeps nickel-and-diming us, though with four kids I usually have to ride my bike separately (when the older two, from a previous marriage, are here instead of with their mom) while everyone else rides in the car, as we certainly can’t afford the Honda Odyssey or Toyota Sienna of our dreams.
I feel like if we had $250K coming in, even for one year, we would be very wise with it and would certainly not complain!
I was thinking two kids at $3k a month. That isn’t uncommon in much of the country at all.
Except that some of those things are in fact luxuries. I own a house in NYC. My kids didn’t go to public school, and I paid college and graduate school tuition for my kids without financial aid. And my household income is not yet $250K and may never be. But I don’t love in Manhattan or even
(missed edit window on previous post)
Except that some of those things are in fact luxuries. I own a house in NYC. My kids didn’t go to public school, we went on vacation every year and I paid college and graduate school tuition for my kids without financial aid. And my household income is not yet $250K and may never be. But I don’t live in Manhattan or even a fashionable part of Brooklyn or Queens. I bought the house 27 years ago and have never upgraded.The non-public schools were not expensive independent private schools, but parochial schools. The vacations didn’t involve international travel or even flying.The college and graduate schools were not at private universities but at the public university. I never spent more than $6000/year on child care, though there were people even then paying much more.
$250K in NYC isn’t by any means rich,but that’s a long way from saying $10K per month is the break even point. It’s the break even point for a lifestyle that includes a lot of built-in luxury - not every luxury, but some.
Raised by pigeons. Just like Tarzan was raised by wolves. It can only build character. Plus if you had a brown Barbaloot suit, you could tell CPS that it was just a dachshund.
NY Times seems to think $30k per kid per year is common enough. At that rate it must cost near to a million dollars to rear each of these urban middle class kids. You could by a Greek island for that…
Indeed right. I read an article in the NY Times years ago ('96 or '97, during the Clinton boom years, when I was living in Jersey City and working in Manhattan) that indicated that NYC and LA actually function in the economy as “pressure release valves” when the labour market heats up, giving employers an option within the U.S. to move operations to find lower wages.
And I got a taste of that myself: I temped at office jobs for a while at ten bucks an hour, but when I called in sick for work on New Year’s Day they stopped giving me assignments. A SoHo literary agency I had temped at as a receptionist, where the people had liked me, then offered me a job as a messenger. Not a bike messenger, but an on-foot messenger. I was provided with a roll of subway tokens that were nearly useless, as the places I had to deliver to were spaced out every three or four blocks for several miles, and not right along the subway lines anyway. They had a back-breaking quantity of packages that I distributed into three large bags of the type a newspaper delivery boy would carry.
Pay? $6 an hour, full time, no benefits. In 1997 in NYC, where the upscale types believe no one can live on less than ten grand a month or whatever. But there are massive numbers of people there living on far less.
I also saw evidence of this in the grocery stores, restaurants, and bars near my apartment. The local supermarket, with signs mostly in Spanish, regularly sold chicken legs for 39 cents a pound. (My roommate and I subsisted mostly on chicken and rice.) The cheap Chinese delivery places had incredible deals–you could get quite full for about three bucks. Same for the stand that sold Dominican food: they didn’t speak English, but I just pointed to the food I wanted and we worked it out. And if you were in the mood to go out and party down, you’d have to pay through the nose to go to a trendy club, for sure; but there were any number of working class bars that sold domestic beer on tap for 90 cents a glass. That was like the standard price (though the glass was kinda small, maybe 10 oz. I’d guess).
As I may have already mentioned upthread, Barbara Ehrenreich talks in *Nickel and Dimed *about how the rich and affluent just end up seeing lower income people as…well, they don’t see them. They are invisible. But they do exist, they are real people, and they cannot be dismissed as non-persons–which is exactly what you do when you say “you can’t live in NYC on less than X” when the vast majority of people in NYC are in fact living there on less than X, often a small fraction of X.
I agree that some of those things are luxuries - but part of being middle class is to afford SOME luxuries and we are talking about break even for a middle class lifestyle - not break even for survival - if all you can afford is to food and shelter, you aren’t middle class.
And that’s the question, right? What amount of luxury counts as “middle class”. I take home around $40/year after taxes and health insurance premiums, and that supports a family of 3. We are frugal people, but I don’t feel poor. I feel solidly middle class. We don’t go on vacation, an I am not going to be able to fund my son’s education entirely out of pocket, but we can eat out and go to the movies and buy books and electronics and save enough that if the AC crapped out tomorrow we wouldn’t have to finance anything. We own our home, and it’s not great, but it’s a middle-middle class home in a neighborhood with “good” schools. (This is a cheap area of the country, for real estate). This is not a place where we worry about crime or anything. I cannot look at this lifestyle and call it “poor”. So when people talk about 100K as the middle-middle class, I do think they are . . .dismissing. . . a pretty solid, pretty happy way of life.
Now, because we are in the “small child” phase, I sorta expect this to be the low-point of our earning years, and there is every expectation that the last 20 years of our working lives will be significantly more lucrative–which helps a lot. But even now, my life is pretty secure–and I think that makes it a lot more like middle clas thn poor.